Yeah, my buddy is a grade school principal. Calling off school for weather related stuff (snow, extreme cold) is a yearly nightmare. His district monitors the decisions of surrounding districts and decides based on the best available data. But its always a damned-if-you whatever scenario.
And that’s just snow.
… with a budget of 600 million dollars.
They overreacted, but I’m not faulting them for that. Who’s to say that this is the reaction to expect every time? They may have not overreacted to the last one, and so I never heard about it, I don’t know. There is criticism being flung about now because the San Bernardino wife shooter once said something on Facebook which was ignored/not noticed. If the concern is that fake threats are going to become a problem as a result of the overreaction, then I would say that that concern itself is an overreaction.
I think the thing you’re missing is the district’s mission and the makeup of the people who run the thing. It’s primarily staffed by administrators who are essentially teachers- principals and other administrators. The school board is primarily… you guessed it… teachers.
They do have a huge budget, and they do have a relatively large police department, but all that stuff is bent in the service of education.
Look at it this way- colleges and universities are run by professors. Ideally, professors expert in whatever aspect of the university that they’re in charge of, but not always. We see how semi-competent a lot of their decisions are, especially when they’re not academic ones.
Take that, scale it up to hundreds of facilities, and make the educational requirements more uniform (i.e. all educators). You’re going to end up with an institution that’s pretty well adapted to make educational decisions, but not necessarily other kinds.
So I’m imagining that when they got this email, they probably took it straight to their chief of police, and called the LAPD and FBI, and they all did a quick pow-wow and made the decision to call off school for the day, under the theory that it’s better to inconvenience thousands of parents than potentially have another Sandy Hook or worse.
They probably have some days built into the schedule for inclement weather (which doesn’t happen too often in CA), so it’s not liable to cause any serious issues in terms of instructional days.
I’m not saying that the LAUSD administrators are incompetent- far from it. What I am saying is that assessment of terroristic threats isn’t really a subject that’s within their purview, and if they made an overly cautious decision as a result, I can’t fault them for that. They really are damned if they do, damned if they don’t in that situation- let’s say they ignored the email and a terrorist attack HAD happened and children were killed- how loud would the outcry be then?
Well, then that’s their problem. They need a staff of administrators who can… administrate! Saying it’s OK that they over-react because they aren’t staffed correctly isn’t much of a defense.
So hundreds of school kids are dying in school bus accidents every day. Well, that’s probably a good thing since they are probably all kids of gang members and would have ended up being gang members themselves pretty soon if they weren’t already.
So what did the terrorists learn in all this about where the best targets for school bombings would be?
I don’t think that’s fair.
They could be the best damn administrators in the world, but still not be fully qualified to evaluate, on short notice and with the need for a quick decision, the seriousness of a terror threat. What do you want for the District, a Director of Homeland Security? A task force whose only job is to evaluate threats of terrorism? How much of the budget are you willing to use, and how many resources are you willing to pull from actual education, in order to make that happen?
I’m not arguing that their decision was necessarily a perfect one, or even the right one, in this case, but i’m also not sure that it was a terrible decision either. It could be, also, that this incident will lead to greater cooperation and communication between the District and law enforcement agencies (local, state, and/or federal) that have the resources and the expertise to properly evaluate threats like this. If such links weren’t in place before, then the School District probably bears part of the blame for that, but so do elected officials and the law enforcement agencies themselves.
If they over-reacted a bit, they certainly aren’t the first. We’re talking about a country where the actual, professional agency charged with overseeing the security of our airline travel has spent the last decade and a half stealing our shit from our luggage, confiscating fingernail scissors, inappropriately commenting on the body shapes of passengers using its scanning machines, and making women drink their own breast milk to prove it’s not a dangerous device.
They learned they don’t need to set off bombs. As we saw, a hoax email creates a massive disruption. We should just ignore threats like this. They are always hoaxes, and real attacks always come as a surprise. Did the hijackers tell the owners of the WTC about their plans?
I was responding to the argument that we can’t blame them because they’re being administered by teachers instead of people who know how administration works. A school system the size of LA’s should have this down pat by now. The NYC schools system seems to have had little or no trouble determining it was a hoax.
When’s the last time a bomb threat to a school or airport or some public center actually panned out? It may just be confirmation bias, but I don’t remember any that really resulted in something. Schools should just ignore bomb threats until something explodes. And yes, if I had kids in school, I’d tell them the same. Real bombers don’t call in a threat, they just go an bomb the place without warning. Hoaxes call it in because they want to see people reacting
The thread of terrorism really came into the public consciousness on September 11, 2001–over 14 years ago. That is long enough for the state of California to have developed mechanisms to deal with it. So perhaps the criticism should not be directed at the school district but instead at the California governor and state legislature.
Other than closing schools, what to you propose to use in dealing with telephone/email threats?
LAUSD has it’s own office of emergency preparedness. They have contingency plans for earthquakes, lock-downs, suspicious packages – a wide variety of different threats. Again, this is not some dinky little organization. It’s budget is larger than the budgets of some of the smaller states.
Imagine if the Governor of Wyoming received an email saying “Terrorists are going to attack somewhere in your state today!” and he responded by locking down every public venue in the state to search for explosives. There are fewer people in Wyoming than there are *students *in LAUSD.
Silly terrorists! Tricks are for kids!
One obvious hole in our system is that it does not seem different school systems are linked together to better understand such threats. NYC, being 3 hours ahead of LA, obviously had this figured out well before the school day started on the west coast.
I believe Mr. Cortines and other decision-makers thought something like this: We have received some information which indicates a slight chance that something bad will happen. If we don’t cancel school, and it comes about, there will be several bad outcomes. If we do cancel school, then … no problem. All of the bad stuff that happens will not be our fault, because we were just being cautious.
To me it seems obvious that children are more likely to be injured and killed in all the chaos that followed the unplanned closing of the schools than they are spending a normal day at school. If decision-makers really cared about the health and safety of children, this should be factored in to their decisions. If they only cared about their own reputations, careers and press, they would not bother to consider this. Of course they are comparing cancellation not to a normal day of school, but to a day of school where they have received the threat. Common sense and historical precedent show that terrorists do not announce their plans like this, so the chances that the day would have turned out to be a normal school day were very high.
As evidence that cancelling was riskier, I linked to a story about a student killed in a traffic accident. I don’t know the average number of injuries and deaths per day to school children in LA. If LA school administrators have historical evidence that it in fact is more risky to be in school than roaming around trying to get home, then my argument collapses.
So for those of you strongly supporting the cancellation, what is your argument? Empirical, that school is more risky than unscheduled cancellation, or that the proper method of deciding what to do was to ignore the expected costs of cancellation?
Come to think of this, why didn’t Homeland Security link the two events? Surely one of the first things to happen would be school officials in NYC and LA alert HLS, no? If not, then that’s a problem.
Excellent plan.
:rolleyes:
What chaos? It’s not like they just herded them out of the building and said “go home.”